On the Park Bench - Author's Forum: Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia

so we're going to give people a few um just a few moments to uh to come in and then we're going to start so i'd like to welcome everybody to on the park bench a public square conversation today we have the third in the series of authors forums uh which explore books uh which uh which cover the topics uh directly relating to or of interest to urbanists and um um the case today we're going to be covering case studies and retrofitting suburbia urban design strategies for urban challenges with authors june williams and ellen dunham jones interviewed by david dixon and i should mention that uh uh that durota dhani is the producer for this series uh an urbanist and architect and so i want to thank duru so you can share your thoughts on on the park bench at this url otpb feedback and register for our next webinars we've got some interesting ones coming up just next week we're going to be covering pandemic coding with hazel boris and susan henderson discussing their pandemic toolkit for local government and then the following week on january 26th again these are all at 12 noon um and we're going to have authors form on a really interesting new book transect urbanism readings in human ecology with author andreas duane and so go to cnu.org resources on the park bench to find out more and sign up i did want to mention today that for those of you who are interested in cnu29 design for change you can submit your session proposal by february 5th design for change is going to focus on the intersection of design and power the power design holds to influence the way we live to physically change and adapt the places we inhabit as well as how we can use it to achieve the change we want to see in neighborhoods towns cities and across regions the cnu 29 program is going to break the mold of previous congresses with multiple formats that maximize the benefits of a virtual congress and encourage creativity and innovation from those who are presenting learn more at cnu.org cnu29 and i also wanted to mention that again cmu is going to be giving charter awards this year for more than 20 years we've been giving these awards out and uh i would venture to say that they are the top awards uh for for urban design and development at multiple scales from from the building the block in the street all the way up to the region and this year's theme is going to be the public realm i would highly encourage you to submit applications by february 9th 2021 go to cnu.org charter awards and as i mentioned we've got a really exciting program today june williamson one of the authors is associate professor and architecture department chair at the city college of new york's bernard in ann spitzer school of architecture and is on the board of director directors of the acsa and aia new york she is the acclaimed author of designing suburban futures new models from build a better burb island press 2013 the other author is ellen dunham jones fcnu she's professor of architecture and directs the urban design degree at georgia institute of technology she's a former cnu board chair hosts the redesigning cities podcasts and was voted one of the world's 100 most influential urbanists by plan edison david dixon is the interviewer today for this webinar and he is vice president urban places fellow at stantec he is the co-author of urban design for an urban century wiley 2015 and co-editor with jason beske of suburban remix island press 2018 david has had a significant impact on new urbanism as an urban designer from the beginning of this movement and his work has focused on helping cities and suburbs alike adapt to the accelerating pace of demographic economic and technological change so once again the book is case studies in retrofitting suburbia urban design strategies for urban challenges the authors june williamson and ellen dunham jones this book is the third in the series on retrofitting suburbs it's an entirely new book not an update it's published by wiley and it is available for order now wherever such books are sold the author's first book retrofitting suburbia urban design solutions for redesigning suburbs helped to change the way we all look at suburbs now we're going to be talking about suburban retrofit more so i won't go into more detail on this book but david is going to speak and then alan and june and david will be asking questions and taking questions or taking questions from the audience you can start using the q a feature of zoom at any time we're going to try to get to all the questions uh but depending on how many questions there are that may or may not happen so please ask them as they occur to you and now i'm going to pass this along to david uh thanks rob i hope you can hear me uh give me a second here while i take control of the screen and put up my some slides i'm going to speak from but i want to actually start by taking a moment to really acknowledge and thank uh june and ellen you mentioned that they uh helped all of us change the way we look at suburbia well they actually did in some ways more than that i i would never accuse you of understatement but um because at a period when the vitality of cities was getting a great deal of attention and the changes that were really causing this this vitality and suburbs were seen as sort of slipping into the past and and maybe even becoming irrelevant when they had been the focus of investment and development and where folks wanted for so many years um basically ellen and and june stepped forward and said you know the same forces affecting cities also hold opportunities for suburbs and here are some great examples of how this can happen that you can go and begin talking to your community about and i think the most important conversation they launched was within suburban communities uh that in some ways found a new future so uh i'm gonna make uh introductory comments here sort of set the stage for uh june and for ellen i would certainly be glad to ask some questions but i'd be more interested in asking your questions uh and so please use the q a feature and i'll sort of collect the questions and group them to make sure that uh as many voices can be heard if not indirectly and and we can really get to get to what's on your mind so i'm going to start out by uh this is a comment i just love i've done a lot of planning with suburbs to sort of a seize a new a new era of opportunity and this was for a new uh community to transform a failing mall outside of roanoke virginia into a new center of community mixed use walkable community and somebody the audience raised her hand and said oh i get it north america is a suburban continent with an urban population and i wish i could have thought of that but i didn't uh and this change in expression between the last slide and this one basically demonstrates how how suburbs that were in invented that were spurred at a period when we had certain demographics at a certain economy and of universal access to automobiles which really didn't happen in this country until right after world war ii were all happening spurred a very different kind of development uh and it looked like the future for a very long time and frankly you know ellen and and june uh published um uh retrofitting suburbia in very late 2008 it was really just in 2008 that a lot of folks suddenly realized that the basic premises that's that supported the uh sprawl and the predominance of suburbia um were under question 2008 sort of peeled back the veneer and what it peeled back was that we had so anyway so the book was very prescient in many ways what it peeled back was what i love to call the sort of the new norm 101 uh and i want to just acknowledge quickly that while kovid has changed many things about how we think about planning and in many ways for the better we are more aware than ever of how much we want public and access to nature we want to for for people to to have streets as public spaces uh that they can enjoy restaurants that can spill out on the streets uh the pandemic has hastened the decline of auto oriented mass market retail and frankly placed more emphasis on the retail that we can walk to because that is what is actually surviving best and boy has the best prognosis going forward the pandem pandemic has not changed basic premises of june ellen's book or or the work they have been doing it has not slowed the fundamental economic demographic technological climate and similar changes that are creating the most in some ways pro-urban are the most urban markets and economy that our country has probably seen and a growing interest in main street walkability and the word i should have added here is community so let's start with what's happening with demographics uh basically the way in which we've grown that you'll notice the circle on the left uh says 1990 2010 it should just as easily said 2000 1950 to 2010 most the fastest group age group to grow were 35 to 65 year olds folks who had families bought cars loved to move to the suburbs and buy a wonderful single family house they then had to take care of um 2010 to 2030 30 but this certainly could go to 2040 given projections we are growing in a very different way first of all more than half our growth is folks over 65 the smallest growth is a group the group with the least growth are 35 to 65 year olds basically when i grew up everyone in this audience is probably too young to recognize these folks but you turned on television and invariably saw a family only uh both parents may have worked only one got paid they smiled a lot most importantly they had kids and they lived in the suburbs and you go look at media now and we are we we see our diversity much more immediately uh one of the things behind this very different uh view of who we are is the fact that going forward for the next 20 years 80 plus percent of net growth will be singles and couples uh so picture a world because we're in it where 80 plus percent of demand singles and couples and actually single parents with children prefer walkable mixed use lively community rich by by definition than urban more urban housing certainly multi-family housing uh less than 40 percent of our housing uh is is that more than 60 percent of single-family detached so right now 80 percent of the market is chasing pursuing less than 40 of the housing this is the most urban housing market going forward we will have had in our history despite whatever memes have come out around tobin in fact actually if you really drill into data urban and suburban markets in most of the us have not changed how they perform relative to each other with covet it's just very high priced cities um uh suburbs are also the most rapidly aging part of our world and that is putting particularly uh suburban uh uh creating a particular mismatch between housing and demand in suburbs suburbs have the same urban demand that cities do um so just to me to make this elitist but if you also look at folks by income and more importantly by education in terms of where they want to live they are much more the higher the income the more education particularly the more urban their preferences are one aspect of all this that we all have to look really hard at uh is the fact that poverty is exploding in suburbia more people in poverty lived in suburbs and cities for the first time in our history this actually happened in 2012 suburbs are much less well prepared to deal with the realities needs of folks particularly their kids uh who are living in poverty and given the very urban nature of housing demand that demand will continue to push up prices in urban walkable centers and push others out uh probably increasing the equity issues that we face today and this is something we hope we can talk about later so we have an opportunity with a big asterisk that's creating an equity challenge but there's also an imperative uh because um us workforce is growing much more slowly today about half as fast as it did in uh as recently as 2010 in 2040 we will still add fewer net new workers than we did in 2010 at the same time 90 plus percent of net new jobs require some higher education so guess what's happening and this is true across the developed world uh there is a growing and increasingly significant shortage of knowledge workers you know educated workforce etc jobs and investment go where these workers want to go remember where educated folks want to live particularly between the ages of 35 and 50 or 50 or 65 rather it's in urban walkable places um the the kinds of of terrific case studies that ellen and and june are going to show you are exactly where our workforce and our economy wants to be uh and if suburbs don't create these places they kind of this economy will go elsewhere and less this sound um much more elitist than i than i wish it would uh it is knowledge industry jobs that create jobs for everyone city of buffalo is estimated for every new knowledge industry job they create five other jobs okay there's a there's a third uh leg on this stool which is what is happening around disruptive changes related to technology obviously lots of other things to talk about but i want to focus these three so we all have heard internet online competing with mass market uh big box retail retail you can walk to is growing if you create housing rough rule of thumb that we use and has been confirmed by again and again and projects to work with if you can get a thousand new units of housing within a five-minute walk in the suburbs as well as the city you can attract enough main street to bring a block of of enough retail to bring a block of main street to life and boy is that important to folks and we can talk more about that um but but uh maybe even more important uh is in the next 25 years from now i will go on record your thing a majority large majority of us will not get in a car turn on the engine and drive we will probably we'll be riding around autonomous vehicles but in urban areas with the critical mass of people and demand those will be shared autonomous vehicles whether it's you're in the suburb or the city this will cut in half our mobility costs compared to what we spend today open up streets uh require much less road right of way opening up uh untold you know tens of thousands millions of acres in cities and suburbs alike for uh green ribbons and and poor people and and people related uses more important not maybe more importantly more immediately over the next maybe 12 years um we will not be driving 12 years from now we won't be uh our cars won't drive themselves but we will the majority large majority of cars on the road will have enough connected technology to park themselves that will mean that we probably have enough parking today to support our parking needs with considerably more development 12 years from now obviously there's an awkward transition this begins to remove the primary cost burden of denser mixed-use walkable development that ellen and june are going to talk about um in suburbs and makes much more feasible the kinds of places that they are talking about we're doing a lot of work with uh the largest uh concentration of innovation uh companies in canada just outside of ottawa a place called canada north uh and this is all about turning the office park you can see sort of in the upper right into a mixed use walkable livable um globally competitive innovation district much more urban place and frankly uh in the next two or three years they will probably and they will introduce an autonomous shuttle to connect folk as they begin to bring in housing and life and vitality to connect folks to that so that you don't get in a car and drive thereby making this complace competitive going forward i say this in part just to help people understand how rapidly approaching these changes are and how important is for suburbs to begin not adapting themselves to this changing technology but figuring out how to adapt this technology to meet their goals uh i'll close with one of my favorite places dublin ohio done a lot of work here it's one of the early suburbs to recognize the virtue of what ellen and june uh talked about in fact their book i think actually helped this suburb make the decision that it needed to have a downtown to stay competitive and it's now the heart of this wonderful community thank you now please submit your questions to the q a box and i'll turn the floor over i believe to june thank you thank you david uh well june is going to be we're going to be sharing uh some slides david i think has set done a terrific job of setting the stage but and actually before i do that i really want to say thank you very much to dhiru for setting this up and rob for your work on pulling all this together so yeah david i think david's talk really did very much set the stage about the very many ways that suburbs are changing especially in terms of demographics and market preferences and the the new technological changes to come which we very much also address in the book um i'd emphasize that while the suburbs have been beloved by many people for a good 80 years um and before that but really we focus on the post-war suburban development there's just no question it has supported unjust patterns of investment and disinvestment unsustainable lifestyles and carbon footprints and ecological degradation however as more of the shopping malls the office parks and other gray field sites are aging they provide terrific opportunities not only to redevelop with mixed-use walkable urbanism and we show a bunch of those but also and very importantly and especially in sometimes the weaker markets they also provide great opportunities to re-inhabit those older buildings with new more community-serving uses and to re-green suburbia so it's not only about the redevelopments uh so the retrofits that june and i track in my database and document in the series of books that are showing here on the left side the the number of retrofits has just been growing enormously since we published the first book and they've also been growing in their ambition when we published the first book it was mostly about if you were doing anything to reduce auto dependency you got in that was pretty much the bar with the first book now it's while you're reducing auto dependency what are you also doing for equity for climate change for public health um so we felt compelled to write this newest book and it's actually here i've got it this newest book because we really wanted to share how these ever more ambitious urban design strategies are successfully helping communities address the challenges that they were never designed for in the 20th century so as i said i received my my copy of the book yesterday um the book is written this new book now case studies is written in two parts part one's chapters describe the sixth urgent challenges and slight edit to uh to rob's slides the title of the book is urban design strategies for urgent challenges and we emphasize that we really do think these are urgent we need to reduce autodependency that's still job one we need to add resilient water and energy systems we need to improve public health we need to support an aging population we need to better compete for jobs and we need to leverage social capital for equity so part one are chapters that really describe those challenges in more detail um they just and we discuss how suburban form actually exacerbates each of these challenges and we discuss in general kind of the strategies then that retrofits how retrofits are addressing those challenges and we go toggle a lot back and forth we provide the reader opportunities to toggle back and forth to part two where it which really is the bulk of the book which is 32 case studies from across the country in both strong and weak and middle markets that are layering diverse replicable strategies to make their communities more resilient more equitable and more prosperous so today june and i will present a brief sample of those strategies so gin next slide so auto dependency absolutely remains kind of as i said job one and in the book we go through a whole bunch of different strategies from obviously adding walkability a mix of uses multimodal transportation transit road diet street networks and actually one of the low hanging fruit if you have to design some parking lots today design them as future building sites so next slide uh just one one of the more ambitious examples out there of building a street network in an area that is otherwise today we would call a strode and very suburban in its form is this project called the pike district in north bethesda maryland and what it's doing that is really impressive is it's incrementally transferring trips from the highway to rail over a four mile stretch of the eight lane rockville pike the county is implementing a developer-led street network plan that creates walkable urbanism at and around the rail stations so the dashed lines in the plan on the left are new public streets being built on private land and paid for largely by those private land owners in exchange they're getting the rights to build much more densely on the right is the redevelopment of the first increment a 30 acre strip mall that has become pike and rose as the street network gets more built out it will this the plan will ultimately redistribute traffic and then the county plans to put the highway on the road diet with bus rapid transit so this is just a small a couple of images of a much much larger but very ambitious and successful it's being built uh really an interesting project next slide um at a much more modest scale of a but also really um beautifully designed project is this one uh the boulevard in lancaster california the heyday of malls we we all kind of know this i think killed off a lot of small town main streets such as this one in lancaster their this town's early response was to widen their main street but that only just further killed off the vitality of the street more recently they hired cnu founders mullen policy ladies whose road diet has magnificently revived the main street it's gone from five lanes to two and it put they put the parking in the middle in between street lights and street trees now reconfigured the boulevard has attracted retailers back its increased tax revenues become a lively event space cooled the hot desert temperatures and reduced car crashes all of which is a good segue for the next challenge improving public health and i'll take it away june hi so the next challenge the uh the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted how already vulnerable people are more susceptible public health researchers have a wealth of documentation of how the sedentary lifestyles associated with suburban form heightens risk of obesity and chronic diabetes of dying in car crashes of addictions but modest amounts of physical activity encouraged and supported by how places are replanned and rebuilt are a low-cost cure this example of freedom park drive in sacramento california is a pilot project that sought to implement the research linking design to increased levels of healthy physical activity the two-block long street is also more complete accommodating pedestrians and their best friends as you can see and the redesign incorporates soft green infrastructure to manage storm water you can see in the foreground how the the curbs are are detailed for that this case study assembly square in somerville massachusetts addresses reducing auto dependency the first urgent challenge as well as public health issues um and here you see the figure field sequence um that was researched and developed and drawn by us for the for the new book um it's tracking changes over time from the 1950s era ford vehicle assembly plant uh to a shopping mall and reuse of of the ford building plus big box uses this came after the incursion of the interstate cut off this area from the waterfront to the walkable mixed-use neighborhood with a waterfront park and a new transit stop that's now emergent and here you can see that new orange line stopped so the the train line was already there but it didn't stop in this location and this is the first new transit station in decades to be added to the boston tea system which some of you might be familiar with and a key idea of the community activist group that pushed forward with this project with a a lot of research about the the public health impacts of particulate matter from the highway and so forth the mystic view task force uh uh demanded that instead of building an ikea and other big box auto oriented uses here uh instead demanded that assembly square live up to its name that is by becoming a place where people could actually assemble together um in in in space rather than a place where cars were assembled and a shout out to ann tate a new urbanist a long time new urbanist and an early mentor of mine the next urgent challenge is to support an aging population so uh demographic data suggests that a larger percentage of the population will be older in coming decades as we reap the benefits of the longevity dividend which is certainly being challenged for the most vulnerable of our older population right now but we do expect to have many more even than we have already uh one and two person households as people long outlive their their child wearing and and family um formation uh uh years in their overall lifespan so uh of this then is a desire among these folks to age in community uh and retrofitting can help to counteract the isolation and loneliness uh associated um with this so we really want to think about how retrofits can be oriented around the idea of lifelong communities adding new housing choices for uh downsizers apartments and missing middle types co-housing intergenerational housing accessory dwelling units memory care units and so on here's one of our case studies promenade of wyzetta in minnesota so here we have an example of standalone boxes and a fee of asphalt on a filled wetlands site to a perimeter block mixed-use buildings with green roofs and a great lawn for residents and and neighbors to to gather uh with the parking structured uh below great it's a fairly complex engineering project which we described in in some depth in the in the book um involved obviously depaving of the parking lots and and uh demolition of the the um 20th century obsolete buildings uh and so here you can see then the project which includes a um an independent living retirement community with continuing care memory units called folk stone it's fairly high end and expensive but you can see the images of folks engaging aging in community this example uh is uh more affordable uh nearby also in the twin cities this is the reinhabitation of a former days inn motel an out parcel building at the maplewood mall into the senior living community with a memory care focus and you can see in the location here it's just across the arterial from the public library in a park that the residents can easily access maplewood mall is also notable for the addition of green infrastructure green storm water infrastructure throughout the parking lots and and the whole um the whole facility which we talk about also uh in the book the uh next urgent challenge is to leverage social capital for equity and also justice and this challenge draws attention to the legacies of entrenched structural racism manifest in suburbs obviously this is big on the political front um and intersects with the various demographic changes as the suburbs are understood to be reflective of the whole diverse range of americans so all northern american demographic groups are found in suburbs different types of suburbs but they are coarsely sorted to the extent of uh kind of entrenched segregation and suburban form makes this them uh more um less conducive to to change and and less resilient so suburban retrofitting can potentially even the field by adding more resources and opportunities in poor suburbs and by opening up access and opportunities in better resourced places that might be right next door and this is an opportunity to uh revisit or re-emphasize those three strategies that ellen and i associate with retrofitting so uh through thinking about this challenge and retrofitting we can build economic resilience often through reinhabitation or various forms of adaptive reuse of already built structures for various kinds of needs supportive needs in these communities um you can also add public spaces to build social capital um that are reflective of today's grammar demographics so re-greening with small plazas and parks physical places for people to gather and interact and support social uses and then uh expanding affordability for all to stay or move into uh redevelopment retrofits and so here the emphasis is on various inclusionary planning and policy tools that need to be in place and emphasized to support access to investments and to prevent displacement here i want to share one of our major case studies uh wyandanch rising in is and very ambitious retrofit many decades in the making at this point we've got new highly affordable subsidized apartments over retail designed around a civic green built on cleaned up brownfields and gray fields that is parking lots former parking lots next to a formerly little used commuter rail station this is out in suffolk county long island new york involved lots of prominent cnurs so jeff speck and torti gallis worked on this received a form based code award for the code on this this project uh so really this was a 20-year process a similar similar to assembly square which was also a decades-long process so the county manager championed early charettes uh long process of land acquisition the the application and receipt of county level state level federal grants for infrastructure upgrades not only to the transit but also to sewer and water putting in a new structured parking garage in order to free up the land for the retrofit there was a strong very strong community engagement process as well working with the grassroots group sustainable long island what's also important here political representation matters the new 15th legislative district office for suffolk county was located here in this hamlet the master development agreement included a labor requirement for all subcontractors to hire first from a pool of local residents who then were trained through the wyandanch community uh resource center which was operating out of a trailer but now and is in the new the new buildings one of the trainees was erica prince pictured here a mother of three living in a shelter when she applied for training and she excelled and became a working member of carpenter's local 290. the wine dance rising planning effort as i said began decades ago back in 2000 when the hamlet which is unincorporated uh was identified it's in the town of babylon but it's an unincorporated hamlet it was identified by the suffolk county planning commission as the most economically distressed place in the county and a significant part of the story is the ongoing effort to gain and keep the trust of local residents often working with faith-based groups community groups in in the um in the town who harbored and continue to harbor very reasonable fears of displacement these fears are deep seated in past experiences decades long of race-based discrimination and access to housing and the provision of services and in this map you can see if you look that uh wine dance is just a couple of miles from the sort of famous levitt town if you could see that um they're very very different demographics from the inception in the post-war period uh so in the 1950s uh developers built and sold 400 cape cod salt box houses the same houses that were built in levittown a couple miles down the road in fha insured non-racially restricted subdivisions in wyandanch which was a real rarity at the time and here you can see the advertisement of the developers in the amsterdam news which is the black newspaper in in new york city and i just want to close out this overview of the wine dance rising case study with some images we've got a pedestrian street view of the mixed use new buildings following the the tour de gallus form based code on the left in the center is delano stewart plaza at wyandanch designed by owen studio and named in honor of a black community activist and journalist which includes a seasonal outdoor ice rink and a fire pit you see here on opening day photographed by ellen's spouse um fabulous photographer philip jones who did some fantastic photographs for the book uh and then on the right the stair tower of the parking structure uh designed by jeff speck which is the first new building funded by the long island railroad that freed up the commuter surface parking lots for the brownfields redevelopment project and now turn it back to ellen all right so i'm going to finish up with two more challenges uh it's certainly one of them competing for jobs and it's important to emphasize that not every shopping dead shopping mall and big box can or should be redeveloped into a mixed-use town center especially not in areas of shrinking or declining population where reinvestment in existing town centers would be so much more beneficial so reinhard but in those cases you don't you know it makes it often can make so much more sense to reinhabit those existing buildings with more community serving uses and create plenty of vibrant places uh with and with regreening and help to grow a much wider variety of much needed jobs uh you know the the jobs info that david shared i think you know is it is certainly true what we there's a growing need for education though a lot of it is is middle wage middle skill jobs is often where a lot of that those shortages are occurring and they tend to still be modest wage um so the it's reinhabitation can actually you know it's it's if we the more we can fuel small local businesses it's that helps to fuel circular economies uh so i'll show one example on of that and we talk about plenty of others in the book but um i also want to emphasize and we do in the book that pre-pandemic and i agree with david i would wager post-pandemic as well much of what we've seen is that urbanism has become the amenity for office especially for those more higher wage more much more educated to jobs and infilling aging office parks and warehouse districts with more diverse uses also is really is a big trend um helping to attract many many um employers so next slide is plaza fiesta is one of numerous malls and strip malls that have become ethnic community centers catering to the new population in the suburbs the new faces while providing way more jobs for small businesses in this case in response to a 250 percent increase in hispanic residence in the suburbs of atlanta one of the malls junior anchor stores was subdivided into 140 small stalls similar to a mexican mercado the owner is getting double the rent and 140 mostly immigrant entrepreneurs are running small businesses and services uh and it's it's a really just we see a lot of these ethnic malls um that really you know they'll they'll also have in this case uh spanish speaking pharmacies spanish-speaking lawyers a lot of the services um and community spaces that really that really are essential so next slide but at that other uh the at the end of those those big office jobs um what we are seeing is over 120 office parks around the country right now are infilling with diverse uses in a more urban pattern so that they can try to provide urbanism as that amenity to attract younger employees one of the this example domain and 12 miles north of austin texas is one of those that is kind of the furthest along it was a former ibm r d campus the diagram on the right shows how new walkable streets in red have been inserted between the existing wide parking dominated streets shown in black the first phases of the development as you can kind of see moving through the uh figure fields the first phase is focused on building walkable urbanism with mixed use retail and housing fairly up quite upscale and then once they'd established an urbanism as that amenity now they're they're attracting facebook and and google and a lot a lot of the big uh high-tech employers they're exploding with new office tenants and they already had one rail station there's now a second one on being planned so we're really sort of seeing there's a there's a lot to learn i think from from domain next slide so the last challenge is yeah the last challenge really is adding water and energy resilience so that we can better meet the um better meet the challenge of climate change the suburbs were not designed with environmental sustainability or climate change in mind and we cover a lot of important strategies in the book on this um and i have a and i'll have a lot of notes here on the slide of just what all these kinds of different different things we we really do need to be doing uh what we're finding is that the water strategies are really now just everybody's putting in different degrees of green infrastructure it's pretty much required everywhere you go um and we're seeing some of them really getting more and more ambitious with the cisterns with the recycling of water we're not seeing as much though still as much just deep having and re-greening as we really need to see i think in this country and we're also not seeing as much on the of the really making serious use of the energy strategies i think there's so much more that we urbanists really can do and can focus on this and that's part of why we hope that the examples that we show in the book will egg others on to implement even more of these strategies but the the good news is that anything we do to reduce energy use also reduces water use and vice versa so the water energy nexus is helping next slide so one great example of you know and quite unusual really you know we see a lot of green infrastructure we're starting to see more and more rain water harvesting or gray water harvesting this project haselo on eighth in portland oregon is also recycling the black water the toilet water um and they're doing it with an on-site living machine that they call norm for various reasons but the it this is a redevelopment of the parking lots of an office super block in portland so that upper left image gives you the before you see an office building with surrounded by parking lots and now the they've the living machine is actually part of the ground the the public space um at the ground level with an artificial wetlands and which then irrigates all the plantings along the two new streets that have been put in so they've put in into the super blocks so now they're getting the blocks back to the 200 by 200 portland size uh one of those streets is only pedestrian the north south street um but they're doing that all of this you know yes it's portland we expect a lot of sustainability from portland but they're they're doing it because by diverting 45 000 gallons a day out of the cso strained sewer system the water recycling is saving the developer 1.5 million in sewer fees so um this you're getting sort of a lot of these strategies that start to double on top of each other what's also interesting about this project is that the residents of the new the three new residential buildings ranging from uh three to eight stories have more bike parking than car parking and that wasn't even enough so they're running out of the bike spaces next slide the last example here um as i said we just need more regreening so we're showing this one uh which is a great example of showing the many benefits that can accrue from regreening this was as an example the meridian hub mall was built with urban renewal money in the downtown of meridian connecticut uh sort of working class uh community community and it was built right on top of a pretty major creek that subsequently led to just flood after flood after flood that flooding the entire downtown today it has been the the creek that you can see the third image is you know taking out the culverts of the um former former creek and building a storm water park with a daylit creek that now pulls 227 downtown properties out of the floodplain so it serves as a park during the day most days but it also is designed a little like a bathtub to be able to handle all of the flooding from that downtown it's also allowed for now the rebuilding of public housing mixed income public housing it's rebuilding the train station it's just a great you start to see it's um the revival of so many things so that concludes our presentation i know we're almost out of time but i know almost out of uh but june's going to finish up with some reminder reminder slides here yeah well i think in the interest of time i just want to in summary show you those six uh uh urgent challenges again that we've um discussed in the first part of the book is a a kind of synthesized a synthesis of the the research from the past decade uh hopefully very readable uh as it applies to to the suburbs and the potential for for retrofitting and then 32 case studies as uh new case studies as ellen said at the outset um layer in what are more of these challenges that represent different uh parts of northern america different types of developments projects of different size and scale and duration of implementation and also different economic contexts or or markets and so uh also the book and we have a newly launched website uh retrofittingsuburbia.com where you can um contact either of us if there are opportunities um and and also get links to purchasing the books and i will stop there because we want to get to questions david's muted mute thank you very much and i said that twice first time i was muted that was really terrific and you covered an extraordinary amount of ground and your very interested audience had lots of questions uh and we're i believe while we technically are supposed to stop at one o'clock uh that rob is going to let us continue for those who want to continue so i will not try and ask all these questions in seven minutes um but i'm going to start with um one that bedevils all of us who do this work which is can you talk at all about having what i like to refer to as the conversation uh which is not with your teenagers but um with surrounding neighbors who are now confronted with change often associated with the word density uh and uh which to me is a very positive term but have you given thought or do you have any advice on how to have how to really have this conversation i will say one thing is that the difference between new construction and retrofitting and existing is that when that mall dies everybody around it who suddenly hated density hated the word urban anything are suddenly going to their planner their commit planners and communities and mayors and saying do something do something what can you do and it really that is what changes a lot of the conversation is israel and i think it's the education about both the benefits of density often it's a very personal question do you want your children to be able to afford to live in your community then why not allow some apartments no um so those are that's those are just a couple of the things but i find that actually a lot of people with read in the face of a failed project they're they're much more open to uh to seeing things and part of what we try to do with the book was put in a lot of pictures of showing befores and afters and saying hey after it's not so bad right so one of the short recommendations is to share our book and and i also just want to acknowledge um and highlight the other conversation that i think is increasingly going to occur in suburbs which is the gentrification and fear of displacement conversation which i was hoping um and and selected the wine dance rising ex case study to include in this presentation to um to bring to the fort as well thank you and there actually have been a number of questions addressed right at that topic so i'll come to a second i will add very quickly in my own experience uh people increasingly and this is not a promise at equate density not with crowding but with amenity uh and not only see the apartments as a place where their kids can live but a chance for them to live in you know it remain in place in their neighborhood but also a lot of the case studies that you addressed and this is going to lead up to a question uh were i just said they replaced what was clearly a development was something that was much more of the larger community it was it was related to the neighborhood it's a place to walk to a place to gather and one of the questions that was asked i thought was a really interesting one which is can you talk a little bit about how these places can help people get past the isolation that particularly older folks living in suburbs often experience uh and which we're all much more aware of today for obvious women so i'll take that one up i think this is this is um hugely important that we recognize the coming demographic change to the first part of your question i would say that's been my answer just in this current moment where there's been a lot of press about the return to the suburbs and exodus from cities and i'm in new york so it's been a particularly intense conversation um in in metropolitan new york areas and i would say that the suburban locations that people are moving to or thinking about moving to have amenities so that's the if they're moving out of brooklyn or some other neighborhood they want to have the coffee shop and the things to walk to and the transit so that's the the places within the the metropolitan area that they're drawn to or if they end up in other parts of the metropolitan area new jersey and so forth we can see that this group will be advocating for changes and retrofits apartments missing dental housing things they can walk to uh crosswalks and and um support for biking a lot of these these things so i would say that the issue of the aging population i think this is just really really interesting and part of what we did in the book is look at some of the fastest growing age-restricted retirement communities and the way they're being built out new with walkable town centers and bike infrastructure and golf cart infrastructure and lots of programmed activities and to say what are some lessons learned there that can be integrated into people who are aging in community downsizing relocating within their same communities looking to the reinhabitations to have education opportunities social opportunities places to walk healthily and so that old idea of the continuing care retirement community that would be built on some green field parcel with a long sneaky drive with amenities that were all like included in the complex or development i think is being very very much challenged about how to integrate these different housing types and think about people at different levels as they age might need additional care and how all of that can be anticipated and integrated into the most urban parts of the the suburban communities so we're going to interrupt here and say that we're almost at the hour point and we've got plenty more questions so we're going to continue on and the folks that have to leave this video will be posted tomorrow so if if we get to your question we'll probably you'll be able to see the answer tomorrow when you when you watch that portion or you can continue on with this once again the book is case studies in retrofitting suburbia urban design strategies for urgent challenges and sorry i got that subtitle wrong before i wanted to make a couple of brief announcements the authors formed transect urbanism with andres dewani january 26 in fact has been postponed so the next author's form is going to be february 16th increments of neighborhood a compendium of built types for walkable and vibrant communities with author brian o'looney so with that we can continue on both of those are great books brian's book and andre and transect urban is both really terrific so i look forward to those um i wanted to just also although add on to this this discussion of the sort of the loneliness the loneliness epidemic i mean that's certain we talk we write about this in the book the surgeon general in 2017 and now back by with biden um announced we are in a loneliness epidemic and the one of the solutions the trends that we've been seeing in quite a lot of retrofits are small programmed parks that you know when you're in the suburbs you don't have the same need for leafy green like you would need in is like central the purpose that central park serves for manhattan but what you are very much in need of are spaces to be to be around other people the suburbs were designed to celebrate private life not public life and these programmed spaces whether it's the farmer's market the yoga classes it's almost cliche you know the movie nights all of that but those serve an extremely important role for helping people get out of the house and at least be around others all right so to follow up on this and and rob i'm going to assume that you'll tell us we just plain have to stop so i'll keep going here um so um there are a lot of questions about equity a lot of questions about mobility and i'm going to try and weave them together for a minute so um one of the realities is it costs about somewhere between 10 and 14 000 a year to own and operate a car in the u.s and buy an older car is only a small piece of that it's operating and parking and all the other things that go into a car uh a family living in poverty is earning probably less than forty thousand dollars a year having one car is a luxury two cars is almost impossible so uh and uh as noted earlier uh the number of folks living in poverty has gone up literally by probably more than two-thirds since 2000 by now um so there are a lot of folks being pushed out from where they did have access to other forms of mobility to places where they don't uh and this connects to uh and clearly relates to i'm riffing off of loneliness here clearly is a different kind of challenge because you can't get to jobs healthcare or each other in that situation but um a number of folks are asking if you can um they're going to be two questions out of this the first i'll get back to mobility uh if you can talk about um what would it take uh we get people out of cars but what does it take in terms of density in terms of other policies or whatever to get transit out into the suburbs and do you see a role for autonomous mobility in making this more possible because it reduces operational costs significantly so let me start ellen and then i'll throw it to you yeah i just quickly wanted to highlight both merit and green and wine dance rising are retrofits that are at next to pre-existing fixed rail heavy rail stations and it's so important still when that infrastructure already exists in a metropolitan area to redirect think about land use optimize the opportunities for people not only to live in those locations but to be able to do a lot of things right there and then get from there to other nodes in the metropolitan network so then maybe once you have the station you have a little buses and other sorts of you know ride chairs and other sorts of things to make up the the the gap with shorter distances to to travel and meridian green is interesting it's like the retrofit of a of a you know post-industrial city that people might live there and then can get to jobs all nearby outside and around it but have a lower cost place to to live so it really is about opening up jobs in the connecticut greatly increase the the number of trains that that come through that station and rebuild station and so forth um i think the question of autonomous vehicles i'll leave that to ellen and i also would want to highlight that freight is part of this too so it's moving goods as well as people i'll i'll say that you know we do talk a little bit about autonomy but because the book we made up this june's book on designing suburban futures were prospective people you know it was people making on projections of what they'd like to see in the future but what we've done in this book and our uh previous book together is only focus on built projects we're not you know and since the uh since the town for avs has not yet been built we don't get into it deeply in this book i d i have separately um i have a another i have a about a hundred page uh study that is coming out shortly on av shuttles and and ways in which week in suburban communities they can be used in robo taxis that's a whole separate um kind of topic but i think it's also really really important when we talk about transit in the suburbs the emphasis on rail i agree with you the existing rail great trying to expecting to be able to pay for new rail only is not going to happen in 99 of the u.s um we are finally making some real progress on bus rapid transit out in suburbs and i think that's where the autonomous shuttle buses and shared robot taxi kinds of things can begin to come in we're also seeing some interesting things with bikes i mean and uh one of the case studies we do in the project is in the book is um in peachtree corners it's suburban atlanta very very hilly very low density very manicured office park where they've put in bike trails because they want to attract millennials because they like to bike to work so you know that you're never going to be able to build enough streets to make that a walkable urbanism but sometimes in these more suburban areas you can get enough bike trails to begin to actually make it bikeable urbanism and we've seen in detroit where that is you know is really being used i think in ways absolutely to increase mobility for the low-income communities and neighborhoods that where car ownership rates are extremely low and i think we we're actually starting to see proposals for car free neighborhoods in those areas those really impoverished uh suburban areas but they're not built yet so we don't have them documented in the book yet but thank you um you mentioned one terrific example of um affordable housing uh a a a a case study that really focused on affordable housing did you come across others that used mixed in that were able to achieve mixed income and do you have any thoughts on how to see more of that given what's happening to the rise in lower income households and suburbs we see mixed income housing is actually i'd say fairly common uh now it's often required in a lot of communities uh one of the more i'd say unusual and interesting uh retrofits and examples is taxi outside of denver where the developers build these very modern looking um buildings but they are do they are infilling kind of uh what has been a largely work orient workplace oriented development now they're building family affordable housing their building which you just don't see that's very uncommon um but so so there there are some really interesting examples and i think get very very successful um at recognizing the niche that the niches are you know it's when we talk about these categories as if uh mixed income housing is one thing they we're often missing actually i think the nuances of of how these are actually playing out in a lot of different places just just to to further that a little bit i think some of the the recurring values that we find through many of the the case study examples we chose to highlight and we're interested in researching for further because of course part of why we chose our examples is if something was of great interest to us to learn more about it and we tried to be very even-handed and so on but sometimes we chose case studies just because we really wanted to to know more and and share but this value of mix yeah in various different dimensions and then another value of choice right so you're not saying people have to do this or that or give off their cards but if they have choices if we design in or redesign in already built places alternate choices from that that was already pre-existing in there that's a real win okay thank you um from a somewhat different perspective but probably getting back to things we've already talked about um somebody's wanted is asked if you saw examples and i'm going to expand this a little bit of innovative approaches to parking for instance shared parking because there's office and and and housing and office uses parking during the day housing at night or other ways that have creatively reduced the parking needs and related to this another question came in but sort of tied a little bit to this which is how many of your case studies benefit from some form of transit maybe bus rapid transit if not if not rail transit and how many are basically have sprung up or sprung up have been have been have been achieved without the benefit of access by anything other than a car so parking was the first half accessibility with car was the other june do you want me i'll i'll jump into the innovative parking mostly to say that we found i think what i would say in general is certainly what we found are pretty much the same strategies that new urbanists are going to be very familiar with yes there are examples of shared parking yes there's a few examples of reducing parking by putting in more biking by putting in more uh more more bike parking or by putting in uh shared zip cars kind of things and stuff like that not a lot but but a few i would say actually what we found more common and unfortunately was that developers who had anticipated that they were going to be getting to do a lot of shared parking so like domain the project that i showed uh in austin that is a large 300-acre development so they had different equity partners for different parts and every one of their equity partners demanded that they had enough dedicated parking to their particular investment in case the others failed that they would be safe for an exit strategy and so it was their equity partners that would not allow them to produce as much of the shared parking as frankly the developers were very much trying to do so i think you know that their folks are trying everything they can but um one of the things we point to in in the book is a work a project that i did with the long island index that was a follow-up on the the um designing suburban features work called parking plus so again that's speculative but the underlying idea is and many of our retrofits of course are on surplus surface parking these already degraded gray fields and so that is kind of a precondition in in some sense for the the retrofit examples but in many cases that parking is retained it's just restructured relocated but we're seeing examples already and i think we'll see more examples where even when that's done it's done in such a way that there's an anticipation that even those short-term kind of just re-accommodating of the parking uh can be further retrofit down the the road so this really is a long game to think about so i think we're going to increasingly see new parking structures built with flat floor plates removable ramps florida floor heights that can be reinhabited and reused for other uses partially or fully uh and um and things like that so we're definitely seeing parking lots that are already right now being designed as to be retrofitted they're being so you're not putting your utility lines just diagonally under the parking lot um so engelwood city center which was covered in our first book at now 20 years later uh they're finally trained they are it's finally caught up development has really caught up and now they're redeveloping very high rise on what at the first in the first phase were parking lots yeah but i think i'd go out on a limb here and the part of the question that said do any of our retrofits are they entirely automobile based i would say there are probably none that we highlighted that are entirely private automobile based um and and very few that i mean almost everywhere you can get on ride chair now so you know that kind of covers the covers the answer but very few i would actually say that actually the majority are not on any kind of rail transit no but we're going to say certainly there are but not the majority they're going to have bus they're going to have some if it's a workplace one there's going to be some shuttles there's there's always going to be so to give listeners maybe a little bit of optimism around that last point i'll i'll note that the project we're working on i mentioned earlier canada north in canada which is uh an office park that's developed into a real innovation cluster and really needs to grow and therefore become urban walkable etcetera uh is not accessible by public transit uh uh um uh lrt um uh there will be some transit access probably in the next five six maybe a little bit more than that and what we're looking at is actually using a dedicated right-of-way autonomous shuttle to connect directly to that uh lrt station and get people to this you can't count on public roads as of yet it's a little too soon but i also want to just remind everybody that unfortunately there are real implications for folks to earn a living driving these things but uh when you pull the driver out of the vehicle you reduce the operating cost by about 50 percent which is one reason there of such interest somebody also just asked me a question said uh if we don't have shared autonomous mobility are we still going to be able to reduce uh road widths uh or right of way assigned to cars and have more room for people and and the answer is actually uh a limited yes uh because cars that talk to each other can drive in seven foot lanes instead of 10 or 11 foot lanes and we're a lot closer to that than we may realize but the more important answer is to develop places as uh ellen and june have talked about with the critical mass of people and density that support shared transit that's right and mix and mix of things so you don't even need the transit in the first place for a certain number of of errands or trips or uh yeah exactly you don't even you can walk like i do i think the other really important strategy there is also just reducing in the suburbs reducing speeds the higher the speed limit on a road the further the distance there has to be between cars you get less throughput per hour even though they're moving quickly but when you so when in the boulevard example that i showed by in lancaster they when they went down from five travel five lanes to two really four travel lanes to two one was a turn uh they also reduced the speed from 45 to 20. and at that speed the cars can travel much closer together they can see oh there's a sail at so-and-so's pull into the parking uh there and they've dramatically reduced car crashes um accident and accidents so you really reducing speed is something we can do right now that once you reduce speeds you also that makes it safer to narrow the lanes and begin to put in do the put the bike lanes and not everything else in and then if you do the land use piece you don't have to travel as far so even though you're going at a slower speed you can still get from point to point in close congestion in the same amount of time potentially when you have shared autonomous mobility or in other ways don't need to spend a lot of money on parking it's less much easier to get the compact critical mass that supports walkability um all interconnected yes exactly yes um and one thing i love about ellen and june's book is that they did not attach the case studies directly to the issues they they raised they did to some extent the presentation today they have certainly emphasized to me and to others that all the issues they talk about relate in a variety of different ways to all of the case studies this is very much about connecting lots of different diets okay uh just before in case we are about to run out of time and we'll keep going as long as all of you want to hang around here as far as i know but a couple people have asked covid related questions and i think it's really important you wrote this book or certainly decided to write this book before the pandemic arrived i think it is even more valid given the lessons we've learned from the pandemic but could you help people understand changes you think that covid and the pandemic have brought and what they have not brought and just any comments on how this relates to your book i'll say a couple of things and then throw it through it yeah i mean i said some of the things already um about the intersection of chronic disease for example making or poverty and other social factors uh making people more vulnerable uh uh to this um pandemic uh um communicative uh communicable disease uh i think the other piece which we didn't really talk about separately because that's kind of the topic of of retrofitting suburbia one is the uh trends in development types and uh so the dead the dead and dying malls and the the obsolescence of these uh property development paradigms that were subsidized and hugely possible popular and significantly overbuilt in the second half of the 20th century and into the early part of this century those trends are accelerating so it was already been going on for for some decades the the kind of selling off of surplus malls and that was part of the development paradigm is to overbuild beyond uh demand but the surplusing of of malls and big box stores and office parks that's that's accelerating in in this moment it's not only that this the the more and more malls are dying uh there's also been a real i track actually so my database i've got about 2 000 retrofits in the database right now there's been a surge uh since the the start of the pandemic in proposals so in folks wanting to redevelop they won't all get re get the financing and nor uh necessarily as i said before nor should they all but there's a lot more both supply there's a lot more demand um we do really see this accelerating and i think to echo what june had said also earlier was that a lot of those urbanites who have are fueling a kind of rebirth of the suburbs right now they're not they're they liked the city they like urban lifestyles they're you know if the suburbs want to retain the the new folks who have recently moved in they're going to have to start providing some of those urban amenities and some urban more urbanism i think the suburbs really provide the pandemic provides an opportunity for everyone to to figure out i mean how i think the big questions ahead for us are how do we ensure that the tele-everything world of telework telemedicine tele-education tele-retail that in many respects it's both cities and suburbs there's but it's certainly uh a big deal in the suburbs how do we ensure that that becomes equitable and equitably accessible and doesn't just rein it has the potential to even the playing field between rich and poor places uh but it also has the potential to absolutely exacerbate those different the digital divide and the differences between them so i think those are some of the really big uh challenges coming ahead in post-pandemic well actually one of the questions that came forward was how important is retail actually going forward should we be talking as much about it as we always have my quick answer is it is not trees it is not nice paving uh it is not green grass it is destinations that get people out and walking and retail and other active uses are essential to promoting the kind of walkability inviting the kind of walkability that then promotes the sense of community that ellen you were just talking about and but i this is your show here so ellen and june do you want to comment on so let me pick up on that and i've been saying this for a while and i'll say it again you you said other active uses there's a whole range of other active uses that actually even includes residential uses because we you know we visit each other or co-housing or co-working locations that can have storefronts they don't have to be on an upper floor and we have a long history of urbanism of service businesses of gathering places of education uses being on the street on the sidewalk accessible civic uses libraries uh preschool all sorts of things can inhabit and enliven the sidewalk and and the street beyond the kind of category of retail and i think this is one of the things that's the evolution is that in these development paradigms and how uh product properties were packaged created these divisions that you either specialized in one kind of development and use or or another so teasing those out thinking about designing good urbanism nice spaces connections for things that over time will be resilient and adaptable for a whole range of uses as we're seeing you know designers use their creativity to twist themselves into pretzels to reuse 20th century development types that were custom designed for very specific and narrow retail uses to put other things in those spaces so um it's a longer conversation i really do believe that we the you know the us is over retailed we're going through an enormous correction um part of the aging of our society also just means less buying less you know basically an elder an old the older the population they already have all the stuff they mostly need they're they're buying experiences we've seen the experiential you know focus shift and it's a real challenge for urban designers to figure out ways how do we really maintain vitality and mostly it's been by shifting to food a lot more food and beverage and services and services and and other things but um you know retail is not going to go away it's where it's doing well is is where it has the opportunity to actually be more outdoors again related to the um especially in the pogo during covid but i think there's you know i don't want to see retail go away by any stretch i think most people don't want to see it going away but at the same time they're ordering everything on amazon and they're killing it so yeah i'm tracking the number of malls being replaced by amazon fulfillment centers is really depressing i also want to say here though you can have residential uses on the ground floor doesn't need to be set back raised up that there are ways to design it i think both the units and the interface to make lively streams virtually for every project that uh probably planned i don't know 15 billion dollars worth of new urban districts in the last 10 15 years 10 years and every single case required that all ground floor retail residential which is perfectly allowable have front doors uh and have not lost that battle once uh in terms of financial feasibility developer willingness or whatever and you're right bring the streets like uh belmar uh just outside of denver is a wonderful sort of retrofit um uh had built a parking garage sort of at its edge and it was built too early to anticipate the residential demand these places would build residential started to go up around it here it was walled off by parking all the parking garages at the edge uh they simply took 20 feet of 20-foot bay of parking along a street fixing housing across the street put in very inexpensively artists uh work cell spaces they get 25 000 people on a friday night who then come and shop in belmar and basically wonders for those housing prices and um there there are as jun you said lots of solutions and they do translate into higher rents upstairs so i will say that actually belmar is one of the case studies we did in the book first book and been back several times with them one of the struggles that their retail has been having is that the area most of the households around belmar um are kind of older aging baby boomers yeah uh the most the folks inside belmar are quite a mix of ages and incomes but the re the restaurants at lunchtime cater to the older crowd the music is quiet it's comfort food they can then switch it in an evening absolutely turn on the loud music it's cocktail hour it's going for the younger crowd but the retailers have a harder time do i go for garden supplies for my larger catchment radius or am i trying to really just sell to an arrow and the retailers have actually had some struggle in that and that is a bit of a struggle in some in several of these retrofits 50 of all retail leases last year were for food and beverage and beer um and i see rob has appeared again here might have time for one more quick question oh my gosh um uh first of all you're getting lots of very nice compliments i should say um a noted urbanist whose last name is lineburger uh chris leinberger has asked um are there he says he's saying there are three types of urbanizing suburbs that he often observes uh newtown centers uh uh greenfield brownfield redevelopment and drivable suburban locations meaning a mall retrofits etcetera are there any other sort of um basic types typologies that you might want to add to that list so i guess looking at the list here urbanizing three types of urbanizing suburbs suburban town centers absolutely and and you know the old main streets i love the examples i mean one of the upsides frankly of the dying malls is that those old main streets are coming back and we see that a lot um greenfield or brownfield yeah and redevelopment of drivable suburban locations malls the business parks absolutely and a real surge of a lot more of that going on but i think what we would describe the reinhabitation is sometimes the corridors um these arterial corridors are bit by bit incrementally being rezoned and so a places like columbia pike um are becoming much more urban and you know in an area that wasn't a previously a town center it wasn't one property it was it's multiple along the corridor so chris thanks for the comment i'd add that i'd add corridors and i would add perhaps a sub category which kind of inflects a little bit more broadly um the the brownfield or or field redevelopment is to look at under-invested suburbs and uh in some cases even public housing or these post-industrial small cities that have become residential only over over time with with no jobs base so even though they're small cities they're in the larger metropolitan areas actually primarily very low income residential areas so meridian connecticut patterson new jersey wine dash to some degree and so it's a kind of reversal in in a sense of looking at these um low-income low under-invested uh kinds of locations for retrofit just to reinforce i think what june is is saying i mean what we see a lot in these the really under-invested areas it's not about urbanizing these places there's not a market demand there's not a lot of money going into infrastructure but it's often even tiny little changes can actually make an enormous difference in people's lives and this is where the poorest of the poor or many cases are living we need desperately to retain our existing garden apartment complexes out in the burbs that are yes they're auto-dependent uh they're often kind of moldy and not the healthiest places to live but they are existing affordable housing that is dying off by simply being condemned the roof's falling in and we're not replacing it uh and and so there's one uh in atlanta i've got a whole bunch of examples of sort of both the horror stories of how many units were used losing but also um at cnu in louisville we brought in leon epstein who's on the board of a really amazing non-profit that the one change is to turn one unit into an after-school program and that suddenly stabilizes the entire complex helps the element local elementary school usually the port the worst in the region um suddenly bloom and so there's often i mean retrofits these modest little things are so important too it's not what we as urbanists tend to be focused on but that is it's there are opportunity we are creative people who look for these opportunities i think to try to make places better and improve communities lives and so june and i do also really pay a lot of attention to those reinhabitations and we've looked at one of those in these inner suburbs but also in some of the um the the ex-urban areas where there were some one could say exploitative developments going back 10 years ago and how to how to restructure those um sometimes even as public housing and public housing in the suburbs one more thing to say yeah i'm sorry this is one more note of sort of optimism and this is um uh it's suddenly uh junior or ellen you made me think of this um we've talked a lot about areas that are growing we've there's been some concern about areas where population is not growing can a mall still be retrofitted and i want to know we've done a lot of work in places like dayton ohio uh suburbs of cleveland and cincinnati where while population may be stagnant or even declined buffalo declining the shift the demographic shifts within the fact that 80 plus percent of net new households are singles and couples means there is actually still significant demand for walkable urban mixed-use lively places uh supported largely by housing investment that then supports the rest so don't don't give up if your population's stagnant there's still a lot of promise okay on that note okay well i think we should thank all the participants it's been a really great webinar and uh thank you ellen dunham jones june williamson david dixon once again the name of the book is case studies in retrofitting suburbia urban design strategies for urgent challenges and you can buy that now just go online and order it um and uh so thank you very much and uh attend the next uh on the park bench next week at 12 noon goodbye